CEO Larry Ellison says new software
gave Oracle the tools - and the inspiration - to integrate,
communicate, and save a billion every year. And now he wants
to do the same for your company.
Executives at Oracle Corporation were shocked when chairman and CEO
Larry Ellison decided to manage the nitty-gritty details of the
business a few years ago. The second-largest software maker in the
world, founded by Ellison and two partners in 1977, was more
accustomed to its colorful leader making headlines in yacht
racing.

What was most surprising, reports Florence Stone in her new Ellison
biography, The Oracle of Oracle, is that "time and experience -
good and bad - have erased managerial flaws, as happens with many
of our best business leaders and he has developed into a great
manager."

One of the things Ellison discovered as day-to-day CEO was that he
had little control over his far-flung empire, because Oracle ran
hundreds of different software systems, each managing one element
of the company. "I didn't even know how many employees we really
had," he says.

So Ellison decided the company had to "eat its own dog food,"
industry parlance for using its own products. But Oracle didn't
have most of the software it needed to meld those many elements
into one Web-based system, nor was it happy with what was available
on the market. Thus began a software revolution that Oracle is now
trying to extend to its customers. And it didn't just change the
company's products, it forced Oracle to completely redesign the way
it does business - and saved a billion dollars a year in the
process.

American Way sat down with Ellison to divine his vision for
Oracle's future and, as always, he had provocative things to
say.

American Way: Tell us about what you learned in the process of
turning Oracle into an e-business.